Martin McDonagh Has Never Won a Golden Lion, and One Live Report Still Says He Just Did
A report published five days ago says Wild Horse Nine won the Golden Lion at Venice. It did not. Martin McDonagh has never won a Golden Lion, and the article is still up with no correction.
Venice closed on 12 September. The Golden Lion went to Woman Unknown, May el-Toukhy's Danish–Swedish–Latvian drama. Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine left the Lido with exactly one prize: the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, for John Malkovich.
On the same day, an article appeared announcing that Wild Horse Nine had taken the Golden Lion in an upset over Danny Boyle's Ink. Five days later it is still there, uncorrected, and its account of the ceremony is wrong in at least four separate places.
What the piece claims, and what happened
The article has Wild Horse Nine winning the Golden Lion, Ink taking the Silver Lion for Best Director, and both Volpi Cups going to Ink's Guy Pearce and Claire Foy. It describes a fourteen-minute standing ovation. None of it holds.
The actual results of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, decided by a jury under Maggie Gyllenhaal from a competition of twenty-one films:
- Golden Lion — Woman Unknown, May el-Toukhy
- Silver Lion, Grand Jury Prize — Possible Love, Lee Chang-dong
- Silver Lion for Best Director — Ilya Khrzhanovsky, DAU
- Volpi Cup, Best Actress — Mathilde Arcel, Woman Unknown
- Volpi Cup, Best Actor — John Malkovich, Wild Horse Nine
- Best Screenplay — Stephane Brize, Coralie Amedeo and Olivier Gorce, A Good Little Soldier
- Special Jury Prize — NAZA, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor
- Marcello Mastroianni Award — Malou Khebizi, A Place to Heal
George Clooney collected the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Ink opened the festival and won nothing.
McDonagh's Venice record is two prizes, both for writing
He is a festival regular with a genuinely good record there, and it contains no Lions of any colour.
- 2017 — Best Screenplay for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The Golden Lion that year went to The Shape of Water.
- 2022 — Best Screenplay for The Banshees of Inisherin, plus a Volpi Cup for Colin Farrell. The Golden Lion went to All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.
- 2026 — nothing for McDonagh personally. Malkovich's Volpi Cup is the film's only official prize.
Two screenplay awards, two acting awards for his leads, and never a Golden Lion or a Silver Lion. "His second Golden Lion" is wrong twice over.
Where the confusion has somewhere to grow
Venice does not have nominees. It has films in competition and a jury that picks from them on the last night. Any reference to a "Golden Lion nomination" is describing a thing that does not exist, and that phrasing has circulated attached to Wild Horse Nine — which makes the step from "nominated" to "won" a short one for anyone working quickly.
There is one further wrinkle worth recording without inflating: the film did pick up a Silver Ship for Best OTP from the Fanheart3 collateral awards, an independent fan jury that operates alongside the festival. It is not a Venice prize and nobody should present it as one.
What is not established
- Whether the false report was picked up or syndicated anywhere else. Only the one instance has been confirmed live.
- Whether a correction has been requested by anyone, or whether the piece has simply been left standing.
- Where the fourteen-minute ovation figure came from. Venice ovations are timed by reporters in the room, and no reporter in the room recorded that.
A footnote worth having
Three Billboards premiered at Venice on 4 September 2017 and then won the People's Choice Award at Toronto on 17 September. McDonagh's route to the Oscars has always run through festival audiences and screenplay juries rather than top prizes, which is why the Golden Lion claim is such an odd thing to invent about him.
He has two Venice writing awards and two Volpi Cups won by his actors. It is an excellent record. It is also, with some precision, not the record in the article.